The Innsbruck election, which takes place in about a month, has become considerably more interesting in the last week because the ÖVP changed their mayoral frontrunner from a mostly unknown guy to a more widely known and more popular guy. In the previous TT poll it looked like FI and its imcumbent Mayor Christine Oppitz-Plörer was pulling away from everyone else, but now the FI has taken a hit and is back in a tie again with the Greens and the ÖVP and Oppitz-Plörer herself has only 39% support left in the mayoral election, making a run-off likely:

The Wolfgang Schüssel-era corruption scandals that are now investigated in a parliamentary investigation committee are really hurting the ÖVP, because most of the corrupt figures during the Schüssel-era (2000-2006) are from the ÖVP. There are also FPÖ and BZÖ figures involved, but it seems that voters are not blaming the FPÖ and BZÖ because they think that Strache and Bucher head the "new" FPÖ and BZÖ, while the corrupt figures were mostly the ones who worked for Jörg Haider and former Chancellor Wolfgang Schüssel.

Austrian far-right party probed over ‘racist’ poster slammed by Morocco as ‘humiliating’

Friday, 30 March 2012

Austrian prosecutors said Friday they are investigating the far-right Freedom Party for alleged incitement of racial hatred after complaints about campaign posters for local elections next month.

The FPOe party’s posters for the election in the western city of Innsbruck carry the slogan “Heimat-Liebe statt Marokkaner-Diebe,” meaning “Patriotism not thieving Moroccans.”

The Moroccan embassy in Vienna issued an angry statement attacking what it called the FPOe’s “defamatory and discriminatory behavior” and accusing it of “humiliating, stigmatizing and discriminating against” the Moroccan community.

“The embassy condemns in the strongest possible terms this hurtful practice aimed only at winning votes at the cost of respect for fundamental human rights,” the Austria Press Agency (APA) quoted the statement as saying.

The FPOe, led by the charismatic Heinz-Christian Strache, is neck-and-neck in national opinion polls with Chancellor Werner Faymann’s Social Democrats, with Faymann’s federal coalition partners, the People’s Party, in third place.

The FPOe is hoping to win seats in Innsbruck city council, where it is currently not represented, in local elections on April 15. The next national vote is not due until 2013.

In January Strache provoked outrage after he allegedly said that the “persecution” of members of the far-right attending a controversial Viennese ball made them “the new Jews.”

While I don't agree with the FPÖ-posters as they are implying all Moroccans are thieves and criminals, there is of course and there has been a serious problem with Moroccans in the city of Innsbruck. Almost all the drug trafficking and dealing at the Hauptbahnhof (rail station) Innsbruck is controlled by Moroccans, there have been shootings and stabbings and thefts among Moroccan (asylum seekers) and in 2009, four young Moroccan men raped a 17-year old Austrian girl in Innsbruck for a few hours and injured her critically. So, you see why the FPÖ does this. The party thinks that the city government, police and social workers have failed to contain the "Moroccan problem". Nonetheless, the FPÖ in Innsbruck is a joke party and even has a far-right rival list with the "LRF". Both of them combined will get about 20% of the vote next month. LRF maybe 11-12% and the FPÖ about 8-9%. At least the FPÖ got the attention they wanted with their "moroccan" posters and it's controversy.

VIENNA -- Senior officials from Austria's far-right party are defending election campaign posters that condemn so-called "Moroccan thieves" even after taking them down to avoid legal action.

The Freedom Party slogan for local elections in Innsbruck translates as "Love your home country instead of Moroccan thieves." The far-right party backs restrictions on immigration.

Innsbruck party officials said Sunday they were getting rid of the posters after Morocco threatened legal action and Austrian state prosecutors said they were considering criminal charges. August Penz, the party's local leader, said he "never intended to insult anyone."

But on Monday Gerald Hauser, the head of Tyrol's Freedom Party, said there was nothing wrong with the posters and urged Morocco to "take back its criminals."

Pretty weird: Even though voters in Styria are happy with the SPÖVP government there and think that the state is on a good path and give the party leaders and their policies good grades, the SPÖ and the ÖVP are losing heavily compared with the 2010 state elections while the FPÖ, Greens and the KPÖ are gaining strongly. One good thing is that the BZÖ follows the path of the German FDP: into non-existance ...